In Could 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked a firestorm by referencing the 2013 film “Her” to focus on the novelty of the most recent iteration of ChatGPT.
Inside days, actor Scarlett Johansson, who performed the voice of Samantha, the AI girlfriend of the protagonist within the film “Her,” accused the corporate of improperly utilizing her voice after she had spurned their provide to make her the voice of ChatGPT’s new digital assistant. Johansson ended up suing OpenAI and has been invited to testify earlier than Congress.
This tiff highlights a broader interchange between Hollywood and Silicon Valley that’s referred to as the “sci-fi suggestions loop.” The topic of my doctoral analysis, the sci-fi suggestions loop explores how science fiction and technological innovation feed off one another. This dynamic is bidirectional and might generally play out over many many years, leading to an ongoing loop.
Fiction sparks desires of Moon journey
One of the crucial well-known examples of this loop is Moon journey.
Jules Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” and the fiction of H.G. Wells impressed one of many first movies to visualise such a journey, 1902’s “A Journey to the Moon.”
The fiction of Verne and Wells additionally influenced future rocket scientists corresponding to Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Oberth’s better-known protégé, Wernher von Braun. The improvements of those males – together with the V-2 rocket constructed by von Braun throughout World Conflict II – impressed works of science fiction, such because the 1950 movie “Vacation spot Moon,” which included a rocket that appeared similar to the V-2.
Movies like “Vacation spot Moon” would then go on to bolster public assist for lavish authorities spending on the house program.
Inventive symbiosis
The sci-fi suggestions loop typically follows the identical cycle.
First, the technological local weather of a given period will form that interval’s science fiction. For instance, the non-public computing revolution of the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties immediately impressed the works of cyberpunk writers Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.
Then the sci-fi that emerges will go on to encourage real-world technological innovation. In his 1992 basic “Snow Crash,” Stephenson coined the time period “metaverse” to explain a 3-D, video game-like world accessed via digital actuality goggles.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and innovators have been attempting to construct a model of this metaverse ever since. The digital world of the online game Second Life, launched in 2003, took a stab at this: Gamers lived in digital properties, went to digital dance golf equipment and digital concert events with digital girlfriends and boyfriends, and have been even paid digital {dollars} for displaying up at digital jobs.
This expertise seeded but extra fiction; in my analysis, I found that sci-fi novelist Ernest Cline had spent a whole lot of time taking part in Second Life, and it impressed the metaverse of his bestselling novel “Prepared Participant One.”
The cycle continued: Workers of Oculus VR – now referred to as Meta Actuality Labs – got copies of “Prepared Participant One” to learn as they developed the corporate’s digital actuality headsets. When Fb modified its identify to Meta in 2021, it did so within the hopes of being on the forefront of constructing the metaverse, although the corporate’s grand ambitions have tempered considerably.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Photos
One other sci-fi franchise that has its fingerprints throughout this loop is “Star Trek,” which first aired in 1966, proper in the midst of the house race.
Steve Perlman, the inventor of Apple’s QuickTime media format and participant, mentioned he was impressed by an episode of “Star Trek: The Subsequent Era,” by which Lt. Commander Knowledge, an android, sifts via a number of streams of audio and video information. And Rob Haitani, the designer of the Palm Pilot’s working system, has mentioned that the bridge on the Enterprise influenced its interface.
In my analysis, I additionally found that the present’s Holodeck – a room that might simulate any setting – influenced each the identify and the event of Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented actuality glasses.
From ALICE to ‘Her’
Which brings us again to OpenAI and “Her.”
Within the film, the protagonist, Theodore, performed by Joaquin Phoenix, acquires an AI assistant, “Samantha,” voiced by Johansson. He begins to develop emotions for Samantha – a lot in order that he begins to contemplate her his girlfriend.
ChatGPT-4o, the most recent model of the generative AI software program, appears to have the ability to domesticate an analogous relationship between person and machine. Not solely can ChatGPT-4o converse to you and “perceive” you, however it may well additionally accomplish that sympathetically, as a romantic companion would.
There’s little doubt that the depiction of AI in “Her” influenced OpenAI’s builders. Along with Altman’s tweet, the corporate’s promotional movies for ChatGPT-4o characteristic a chatbot talking with a job candidate earlier than his interview, propping him up and inspiring him – as, properly, an AI girlfriend would. The AI featured within the clips, Ars Technica noticed, was “disarmingly lifelike,” and prepared “to chuckle at your jokes and your dumb hat.”
However you could be stunned to study {that a} earlier era of chatbots impressed Spike Jonze, the director and screenwriter of “Her,” to put in writing the screenplay within the first place. Practically a decade earlier than the movie’s launch, Jonze had interacted with a model of the ALICE chatbot, which was one of many first chatbots to have an outlined persona – in ALICE’s case, that of a younger girl.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Photos
The ALICE chatbot gained the Loebner Prize thrice, which was awarded yearly till 2019 to the AI software program that got here closest to passing the Turing Take a look at, lengthy seen as a threshold for figuring out whether or not synthetic intelligence has turn out to be indistinguishable from human intelligence.
The sci-fi suggestions loop has no expiration date. AI’s capacity to type relationships with people is a theme that continues to be explored in fiction and actual life.
A number of years after “Her,” “Blade Runner 2049” featured a digital girlfriend, Joi, with a holographic physique. Effectively earlier than the most recent drama with OpenAI, corporations had began growing and pitching digital girlfriends, a course of that can little doubt proceed. As science fiction author and social media critic Cory Doctorow wrote in 2017, “Science fiction does one thing higher than predict the longer term: It influences it.”
